Sunday, 20 February 2011

The beginning

There’s a NW blowing, rain falling and I’m stuck wondering what to do. I don’t feel like reading. I’m stuck in three novels, Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling, Ellroy’s The Cold Six Thousand and Irvine Welsh’s Porno but I’ve ground to a halt. They are good. I like their writing styles. But, they are all dealing with the under belly of western human society and quite frankly I’m fed up with it. I know it exists. I’m aware that we all have this dark side that lurks within us but to be honest I’m not interested anymore. At the precise moment I don’t wish to submerge myself in its depths observing people who for some reason are wallowing in it. I’d rather follow a positive trail.

So, almost reluctantly, I’ve decided to write a blog. Why the reluctance? Well, I grew up writing with a pen on paper. I still see computers and the net as an alien world which I don’t understand or really wish to, I’m a classic techno dinosaur-slowly, very slowly, evolving.

More than that, I do wonder about modern communications, I caught a train to London a while back and everyone bar me was holding a conversation. Great, I thought, until walking through the carriage I realized no one was talking to anyone nearby, everyone was talking into mobile phones. Don’t they have relationships with humans? An evening later two young couples came into a restaurant I was in, sat down at the table next to me and promptly sat in silence scanning their mobiles and texting, the couple at the other side were doing the same, err hello.

I explained this to my long term partner, now wife, I’m really not used to calling her that or really wish to, we’re partners. Her answer: join in, write a blog. What!!! Who would read it and why?Her answer: just do it, stop being so defensive and reluctant. You enjoy writing, you have interesting things to say, people will be interested. People will read it. Me, I remain to be convinced.

So I will come in from the cold, actually it’s more temperate than that, I posess a mobile and I do text a bit. I won’t twitter, that profoundly superficial name is enough to put me off. Neither will I have one of those electronic diaries that I read about recently that records everything. When would you read it? It would be like constructing a labyrinth, or partaking in fantasy virtual worlds, or in 2050 have my personality downloaded into a machine where I can continue to live long after my demise, (until the cleaner switches it off to plug the Hoover in.)I often wonder if these things have already happened, I’ve always had this sneaky feeling about reality.

So what do I say? I was born 1951, in Bristol, UK, after thirty three years living with my partner, now married, (we needed time just to make sure,) two kids, live in West Cornwall, retired science teacher. Hobbies, cycling, ornithology, pilates, wandering around on foot, trespassing, continuous fascination with life, conversing - preferablywith a real human, whose face and body I can see. I have already written an autobiography, some 255,000 words of it. A size that has my son in fits of laughter. Chapter 4 about my farming and hippy days in North Somerset and Bristol in the 70s is a mere 80,000 words. It does include a précis of five novels, two books of poems and a outline of a quasi religion I dreamt up at the time, which, if the truth be known, I’m still rather partial to. For some reason I don’t think it could fit in here. I looked on the internet the other day, I looked up writing autobiographies. They basically stated that it should be one page, with six paragraphs. If you can fit your whole life into that you either haven’t done very much or you are an incredibly good writer.